Recurring Events Calendar - sample base

[Charles_Beckett]

Schedules Example Base

This is my first post to forum; hope I get the mechanics right.

You may find this base handy if you need to schedule recurring events.

I work for a community radio station and wanted to be able to offer users the ability to schedule our on-air broadcasts and various meetings as recurring events. I wanted to give users the same flexibility they have in Google Calendar and Outlook.

I’ve encapsulated recurring date calculation logic in a single table: “Schedules”. I’ve seeded the table with example rows and the primary field’s default formula describes each row using the user-entered fields.

The Schedules calendar view shows a set of example recurring dates, with the primary field documenting each recurring pattern. Check out the calendar view to get a quick idea of scheduling features.

Since all recurring dates are calculated off of the value of the built-in Airtable TODAY() function, the calendar is always automatically up to date. Recurring dates that slip into the past are recalculated into the future as each day passes.

The implementation is not complete: The design and usage document in the Documentation trable of the base outlines design issues and the implementation backlog. I’m publishing this early for selfish reasons. If I’m lucky others will have better ideas and/or implementations. I’m thinking of you, W_Vann_Hall, and all those experienced developers that can poke holes in this thing and/or point me to better ideas and code.

I intend to deploy the schedule table by adding it to our bases where needed and to keep the date logic encapsulated in the table. I’ll use links, lookups and rollups to integrate the date logic into the tables that need it.

The ‘’'Documentation ‘’'table holds source listings and more detailed user documentation.

Recurrence Patterns

The date logic supports the following types of recurring dates:

• Weekly events on a specified weekday.
  ** ‘‘Every Wednesday’’
  ** ‘‘Every other Thursday’’
• Monthly events on a certain day of the month.
  ** ‘‘Every month on the 15^th of the month.’’
  ** ‘‘Every other month on the 1st^h of the month.’’
• ‘‘Monthly on a certain weekday’’
  ** ‘‘Every month on the last Sunday’’
  ** ‘‘Every 4^th month on the 3^rd Tuesday’’
• ‘‘One time events’’
  ** ‘‘Just once, on July 17^th’’
• ‘‘Ad Hoc events. These are like one-time events but the date field is not a formula, enabling the user to drag and drop the event to a different date time.’’

[Elayna_Karolevi]

Thank you so much!! This will be awesome, and will do.

[Delaney_Overton]

Thanks for sharing @Airtable_Clerk ! This is a powerful tool. One feature I did not see that would be useful is the ability to create a weekly event with multiple weekdays, such as Weekly every M/W/F. Is this a current feature or planned addition anytime soon?

[Charles_Beckett]

Thanks for your feedback. I’d like to add that feature; it’s a pain to set up three weeklies, one for each day. I’m pretty snowed under with other bases these days but your feature is already at the top of my todo list.

[Margaret_Winwar]

@Airtable_Clerk Thank you for sharing your hard work! This is exactly what we have been looking for. One quick question. I do have one issue that I haven’t figured out. All the dates and times are correct in my AirTable base. When I “Sync to an External Calendar” like Outlook, the times are off by 6 hours. Do you have any idea why that would be?

[Airtable_Clerk]

Can’t be totally sure, but I’m guessing that the problem lies in the setting of the date fields. You can set date field and time in a field to be GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) also called UTC, or you can set it to display your local time zone. This may be your issue. Let me know what time zone you are in.
Here’s a good article on Airtable’s use of Timezones and locales: Timezones and locales – Airtable Support
Let me know if you are still stumped; perhaps we can arrange a Zoom meeting.

[Katie_Luna]

@Charles_Beckett Is there a way to create recurring daily events i.e. every Monday-Friday from ‘Start Date’ until ‘End Date’?

[Airtable_Clerk]

Daily events is at the top of my wish list, but to get around its lack for now, you can create a weekly event for Monday, then duplicate the event and change the day of the week to Tuesday, and so on. I’ll be getting back into the code in the fall and will add daily/weekday/weekend events. Anything else you’d like to see?

[Alex_Faltine]

Hi @Charles_Beckett firstly, huge fan of your base! Second, I have been getting stumped on getting the calendar dates to span over the course of multiple days. The Anniversary date from your base displays as a two day event but I think it might have more to do with the fact the 24 hour period is in the middle of the day so it rolls into the next day ??

My need for this use case for this is to show the span of a pay period on a bi weekly bases. When I leveraged your ‘End Date’ field to put the last date of the pay period it did not display the way I thought it would.

I would consider my Airtable skill to be above average and I have to say your base has a beautiful sophistication I have become enthralled with… kudos!!!

I much appreciate any notes or insights you might be able to share around this. Many thanks

[Alex_Faltine]

OMG I FIGURED IT OUT face palm… all I had to do was multiply the # of days by 24hrs and put that # in the Duration field for the event to span over the days I needed it to…

LOL typing it out was extremely helpful :laughing:

[AndiTrack]

Do you have this still? this is exactly what I'm trying to create!